A BIT MORE IN DETAILS

I am an Italian/British wall painting and stone conservator. I have always been attracted by art, colour matching, textiles and crafts in general, photography and maths, which is a very useful combination in knitting design!

Knitting has been my hobby through all my life, with a long break during university years. My mother thought me basic British knitting techniques at the age of 7/8 years old. Since 2008, I have been living in the UK where I learnt many more knitting techniques including the continental style, mainly through knitting publications, knitting club and tutorials on the Net.

Since a young age, my inspiration source comes mainly from art, in particular from ancient geometrical mosaics and medieval wall paintings. In fact, there are so many motifs that figurative art has in common with textiles, and I draw a lot of inspiration from this in my knitting. Travelling plays also a fruitful source for my creativity: landscapes and local crafts continuously feed my imagination. Often, it amazes me to find such tight connections (or at least I see those connections) between local landscapes and people, textiles and crafts. I have experienced this epiphany very strongly in places such as Peru, Mexico and most recently, Shetland.

 Colours and colour combinations play a big role in my creations, including greys and blacks that are actually full of colour themselves! Patterns, repetitive motives, shapes, combined with colours, are indeed the main focus of my designs.

 I have often created also my own designs, even if earlier on I did it in a spontaneous way, so I didn’t record them. From 2015 I started to design and self-publishing my own patterns.

The first great opportunity to get visibility as a knitting designer arrived in 2019 when one of the patterns submitted for Warm hands competition, set by Kate Davies, was chosen to be published in the Warm Hands book, that was launched on 15 January 2020.

This experience has definitely given me the final push to get more bold and confident in my designing skills, enabling me to give shape to many ideas stored in my mind and even generate many more! The feedback and support received by Kate Davies really gave me the strength to embark this incredibly exciting, demanding, challenging and satisfying journey! So, after some e-mail exchanges and chats over the phone with Kate, the idea of Colour Moves, my first book of knitting designs, took shape. Make // Mark is the imprint under which this book is published. The publication of this website is coinciding with the launch campaign for Colour Moves.

Photo credits ©Claudia Fiocchetti for all the images in this website, unless differently specified.